For most people, “customer service” doesn’t engender warm, fuzzy feelings. Consumers are tired of interacting with companies that sidestep their questions or speaking to automated systems that can’t solve problems.

That’s why companies that provide great customer service – companies that empower agents to make decisions and celebrate their work – really stick out. They seem like such outliers. But I’m here to tell you that the future of customer service looks more like the outliers than that call center you just spent 30 minutes with, most of it on hold.

Though I live in San Francisco, this isn’t just some hippy nonsense. A number of fundamental shifts in recent years have caused companies to rethink how they invest in and deploy customer service. The result is that many businesses are once again creating cultures of caring. They treat their customers like human beings, respect their intelligence, value their time and ideas, and solve their problems rather than simply funneling them through a process.

Businesses built on the Internet are built on customer self-service

According to a recent Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) survey, 43 percent of respondents (62 percent ages 18-24) feel they can solve service issues on their own if companies put better self-service tools in place. But large corporations generally don’t, which is one reason they often provide such awful customer service. Instead, their customer service agents spend most of their time bridging a digital divide between the consumer and those back-end systems only the agents can reach.

In this more traditional model of customer service, agents aren’t empowered to be human or real; they can only turn dials that customers can’t turn on their own. That’s why they work from scripts. It’s human-powered automation, and it’s inhumane, both to the agents and to the customers.

Not so for those businesses built from the ground up on the Internet. Their customers have all the dials and switches at their command. If users contact customer service, it’s probably because they don’t know which dial to turn, not because they can’t access it. In this world, there are no scripts because anything that could be scripted has already been automated and made available to the end-user, who now finds it inconceivable that they should have to contact companies to change basic information, like notification settings or credit card information.

According to BT Global Services, 56 percent of online consumers agree that the calls they do make to customer service are much more complex, as simple transactions are often automated. So once you remove those rote tasks, what’s left are the exceptional issues that require savvy agents to unpack and solve.

Subscription-based models blur the lines between sales and support

An even more important shift shaping the future of customer service is that more and more companies are adopting subscription-based models, which significantly blurs the line between sales and support.

The move to subscription-based models isn’t big news in Silicon Valley, but what’s remarkable is how widespread this shift is already, even outside the area. According to Incyte Group, 50 percent of U.S. businesses have adopted or are planning to adopt a subscription-based model. And subscription-based businesses are rendering the traditional sales funnel obsolete.

It used to be that sales people tried like crazy to move consumers from lead to prospect to customer as quickly as possible. That was the hard work. Once prospects became customers, they got locked into multi-year contracts and the business had little reason to spend more time on them. Customers then were handed off to those call centers mentioned earlier.

That’s no longer the case. Today, people show up at your digital door, go through a self-service sign-up process, and become paying customers before you even have a chance to enter them in the CRM system. Now it’s about trying like crazy to keep these customers. Every (now increasingly complex) customer interaction can easily turn into an upsell opportunity or the potential to lose a customer. Yet another reason savvy companies are staffing their support teams with high quality agents who can handle any issue that comes up – ultimately blurring the lines between sales and support.

Social media is the catalyst, if not the channel

Of course, it’s impossible to discuss the future of customer service without acknowledging that social media is resetting customer expectations.

For all the hype about social support, there is still little data to back the idea that people prefer to tweet their customer service issues. AYTM’s survey indicates that only one percent of respondents prefer to handle their customer support issues over Twitter versus more traditional channels like phone or email.

When companies make more traditional methods of contact easily available on their website, customers rarely turn to Twitter for customer service. Only when companies corrupt traditional channels and aren’t responsive (for example, an airline may take two days to return an email but only 20 minutes to answer a Tweet) do customers flock to social media to air their grievances. It’s not that customers enjoy asking for help in 140 characters or less. It’s that they like the way and the speed in which they are (currently) treated on social channels.

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